From Statism to Federalism in the 1990s
Daniel J. Elazar
As the dust of the Cold War settles in the 1990s, we find more federations in the world than ever before, covering more people than ever before. These can be seen as the foundation stones of the new paradigm. At present there are twenty-one federations (not counting what remains of Yugoslavia or what is being attempted in Bosnia) containing some two billion people or 40 percent of the total world population. They are divided into over 350 constituent or federated states (as against 180 plus politically sovereign states).
Alongside those federations are numerous federal arrangements of one kind or another, usually asymmetrical (federacies and associated states), whereby the federate power has a constitutional connection with a smaller federal state on a different basis than its normal federal-state relationships, one that preserves more autonomy for the small federated state or is based on some relationship between a Westernized federation and its aboriginal peoples. The United States, for example, has federacy arrangements with Puerto Rico (recently reaffirmed by the people of Puerto Rico in yet another referendum and the Northern Marianas and recognizes Native American (Indian) tribes within it as domestic dependent nations with certain residual rights of sovereignty and certain powers reserved to them that now are gaining some real meaning, whether through responded tribal self-government or the opening of gambling casinos in tribal hands.
Indeed, one of the manifestations of the new paradigm is the way in which federalism has played a role in restoring democracy in various states. Spain has already been mentioned. Federalism was also reflected in the restoration of democracy in Argentina and Brazil. Indeed, in Brazil the existence of federalism even preserved a modicum of free government during the military dictatorship through the state governors who could remain in power and even have limited elections because of their strength both political and military (the state police). It has been a means of trying to further extend democracy in Venezuela where the state governors recently transformed into elected officials, played a crucial role in protecting democracy during the last attempt to oust the president, and seems to be an instrument in slowly transforming Mexico from a one-party into a multi-party polity. Even more dramatic was the way in which federalism was used to reunify Germany after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic. Its territory first was redivided into five federated laender (federated states) and then those five states joined with the eleven federated laender of the German Federal Republic plus Berlin (previously an associated state) to emerge as the expanded Federal Republic.
Beyond this circle of federations there have emerged the new confederations such as the European Union that include federations such as Germany, unions such as Great Britain, and unitary states such as France. Many of the states within these new confederations have developed federacy and associated state relations of their own or decentralized internally as part of the process of the paradigm. Take, for example, Portugal and the Azores or Monaco and France.
Beyond those federations and confederations, there are looser league arrangements such as the CSCE in Europe and NATO for the North Atlantic community which have moved beyond their original standing as groups of states linked by treaty to acquire certain limited but nonetheless real constitutional powers, the first in the area of human rights and the second in the area of defense. In the 1990s, these began to be supplemented by regional free trade areas, the oldest of which, linking Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg as the Benelux nations, essentially had been superseded by the European Community, but the newest of which the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) or CARICOM offer all sorts of promise for the future of their members and for future expansion. Last, but hardly least, were those self-same type arrangements on a worldwide basis as we have seen with the latest round of GATT negotiations. Despite the fact of its being merely a treaty, the world's leading industrial nations have discovered that they can not live without GATT so they have to resolve the serious difficulties among them whether they like it or not.
Thus, at the threshold of the third millennium of the Christian era and in the second generation of the postmodern epoch, the paradigm shift seems to be well advanced and moving right along. Indeed, even the most troubled spots of the first generation of the postmodern epoch seemed to be choosing federal paradigms as ways to get out of their presumably "insoluble" conflicts: the Commonwealth of Independent States in the former Soviet Union, the new near-federal constitution in South Africa, the Israel-Palestinian Declaration of Principles which rests upon the ability of the two sides plus Jordan to establish, at the very least, a network of joint authorities as well as to further develop their separate entities either as states or in the manner of states, and now the British-Irish declaration on Northern Ireland which opens the door to peace negotiations for that troubled area, also along lines that will combine self-rule and shared rule though still very vague ones.
This new paradigm has yet to become as rooted as the old one. What can be said about this new paradigm is that while the old state paradigm was a recipe for war more often than not, the new federal one is equally a recipe for peace, if it works.
